A small, disturbing, curiously memorable film by the director of Things to Come (1936), made for children but capable of terrifying them. Through a little boy's eyes we see Aliens from a UFO take over the minds of everyone in a town, beginning with the boy's own parents. The army moves in, there is an Underground battle and the aliens are defeated. The boy wakes up and realizes that it was all a dream ... but then he once again sees the UFO land behind his house. (Extra footage was shot for the European print to substitute for the all-a-dream ending, which it was felt would be unpopular; more recent prints have combined both versions.)

Although Invaders from Mars was cheaply made, Menzies produced – through the use of mildly expressionistic sets (reinforcing the dream idea) and a camera placed to give us a child's-eye view – a powerful sf metaphor for the loneliness and alienation of a child whose world seems subtly wrong. The image of human bodies concealing incomprehensible and menacing alien motives was, in its Paranoia, an important one in US sf cinema, especially during the 1950s Communist-spy phobias.

Disappointing (although astonishingly faithful) remake by a director more at home with exploitation horror movies. The more sophisticated special effects (Martians created by Stan Winston) and the updating of the setting serve only to throw the original's flaws into high relief. What carried eerie conviction on the small screen becomes merely silly on the big one, especially as Hooper's direction sinks into near-incoherence in the pacing of the finale. The best bits, unsurprisingly, are straight from the Horror genre: possessed parents chewing horribly burnt bacon, a malicious schoolteacher eating a live frog, etc. [PN/JB]

Connect with SFE

SFE Blog

We passed a couple of major milestones on 1st August: the SFE is now over 4.5 million words, of which John Clute’s own contribution has now exceeded 2 million. (For comparison, the 1993 second edition was 1.3 million words, and … Continue reading →

We’ve reached a couple of milestones recently. The SFE gallery of book covers now has more than 10,000 images: this one seemed appropriate for the 10,000th. Our series of slideshows of thematically linked covers has continued to grow, and Darren Nash of … Continue reading →

We’ve been talking for a while about new features to add to the SFE, and another one has gone live today: the Gallery, which collects together covers for sf books and links them back to SFE entries. To quote from … Continue reading →